The Day Sweet Bobby Lost His Mind Over a Watermelon

Almost forty-five years ago, when I was a probationary police officer assigned to Newton Street, I learned that some of the best stories in a police station were the ones you didn't actually see happen. This is one of those. I saw some of the aftermath firsthand, but most of what happened I pieced together from conversations around the station, listening to the people who had been there and the people who had heard about it before I did. That's the way stories traveled through a police division in those days, and by the time I arrived, this one had already become part of Newton Street lore.

We had a watch commander I'll call Sweet Bobby Jones. Sweet Bobby was a big man, an overweight African American sergeant who had strong opinions about almost everything and wasn't particularly reluctant to share them. More importantly, he was a Sergeant II. On an LAPD uniform that meant three stripes with a rocker underneath, and making Sergeant II in those days was an accomplishment. Whatever else anybody thought about Sweet Bobby, he had earned some rank and authority along the way.

He also had a tendency to rant. He could come into roll call, find something that offended his sense of how police work ought to be done, and get going. He was funny, though, and I think he knew it. Once Sweet Bobby got wound up, everybody got the benefit of his opinion, and apparently a couple of officers decided one night that it might be entertaining to help him get wound up.

Their plan was simple enough. They created a completely fictitious assault-with-a-deadly-weapon report and waited until close to end of watch to turn it in. Timing was part of the joke. Sweet Bobby would be trying to get through the last of the paperwork, sign everything that needed to be signed, clear the watch and go home. The officers apparently suspected that under those circumstances he wasn't reading every word of every report put in front of him, and they decided to test the theory.

The report described an assault with a deadly weapon. The names were fictitious, the circumstances were fictitious, the crime was fictitious, and buried in the narrative was the detail they expected would bring Sweet Bobby to life.

The deadly weapon was a watermelon.

Somebody had supposedly assaulted somebody else with a watermelon, and the officers who created the report expected Sweet Bobby to get to that part, realize what they had handed him and explode. Presumably they would get a memorable end-of-watch rant out of him, everybody would have a good laugh, and the report would disappear.

Except Sweet Bobby didn't read it.

He signed it.

That should have ended the joke. The officers had proven whatever point they were trying to prove: put something in front of Sweet Bobby at the end of watch, when he was in a hurry to get everything cleared, and there was a good chance he would sign it without reading it closely. They had their story. Somebody should have pulled the report out of the paperwork, admitted what they had done and thrown the thing away.

Instead, somehow, the report kept going.

It went to Records, where nobody had any particular reason to suspect that a properly completed crime report bearing the watch commander's signature was a practical joke. It was processed and duplicated. It received the appropriate numbers, including its division reference number, and entered the LAPD system as what it purported to be: an actual assault-with-a-deadly-weapon report.

By the next morning, the watermelon had made it to detectives.

Normally, the Detective III supervising the crimes-against-persons table would have handled the assignment of incoming cases, but he happened to be off. Another detective was filling in and doing the Detective III's job that morning, which included assigning cases to investigators. Across his desk came an apparently legitimate ADW report. It had been written, approved by a watch commander, processed through Records and given all the numbers an actual crime report was supposed to have.

So he assigned it to a pair of seasoned detectives.

And they began investigating it.

By then, this ridiculous watermelon had traveled remarkably far through the Los Angeles Police Department. A couple of patrol officers had invented the crime. A Sergeant II had signed the report without reading it. Records had processed it. The system had accepted it. A detective acting in a supervisory capacity had assigned it, and now two experienced investigators were spending their time trying to solve an assault that had never occurred.

Somewhere in the course of that investigation, the thing finally began to unravel. There was no victim to interview, no suspect to find and no crime scene to examine. The names in the report weren't real because the officers who wrote it had invented them. Eventually the seasoned detectives reached the only conclusion available to them: there hadn't been an assault with a deadly weapon. There hadn't been an assault at all.

There hadn't even been a watermelon.

At that point, however, there actually was something to investigate. Somebody had created a fictitious crime report and introduced it into the LAPD reporting system. What had begun as a practical joke intended to make a watch commander rant had gone through Records and far enough into the investigative process that two detectives had actually begun working the case.

I don't remember all of what happened administratively after that, and almost forty-five years later I'm not going to manufacture details to fill in what I don't know. I was a probationary officer at Newton Street when I heard about it, and I saw enough of the aftermath firsthand to know that the joke had gone considerably farther than anybody who created it had intended. The rest came through the conversations that followed, because something like this wasn't going to happen in a police station without everybody eventually hearing about it.

I do know that somewhere along the way Sweet Bobby learned what had happened. He learned that the report he'd signed without reading was a setup, that the deadly weapon was a watermelon, and that his signature had allowed the joke to escape the station and turn into an actual detective investigation.

And then Sweet Bobby went off.

Which, when you think about it, was exactly what the officers had wanted him to do in the first place.

It had just taken a little longer than they expected.

That was the day Sweet Bobby Jones lost his mind over a watermelon.